Alan Gottlieb and Dave Workman: Bloomberg's gun control campaign based on questionable statistics

July 04, 2014

When Michael Bloomberg recently suggested that his pathway to heaven was already paved with his own golden "gun control" deeds, he overlooked one of the Ten Commandments, the one about giving "false testimony."

The billionaire ex-mayor's long-running gun prohibition campaign is built around falsehoods — a pattern of deceit that has included counting a slain terrorism suspect as a victim of gun violence, the persistent use of a bogus claim about gun sales and background checks, and grossly inflating the number of school shootings.

He is spending $50 million, a far tidier sum than 30 pieces of silver (even with today's inflation rate), on the Everytown for Gun Safety campaign to perpetuate these myths, and one should ask why. If this new gun control effort is so worthwhile, why is it based on a foundation of lies?

When an earlier Bloomberg-funded effort, the No More Names bus tour under the auspices of his Mayors Against Illegal Guns, included the names of criminals justifiably killed by police and private citizens, it was embarrassing. Public outrage was compounded because one of the names was that of a Boston Marathon bombing suspect who died in a shootout with police.

The continued use of another questionable statistic — that 40 percent of gun sales occur without background checks — should be reason enough to doubt anything else that emanates from a Bloomberg-funded organization. That statistic has been debunked by The Washington Post Fact Checker, which gave it a blistering Three-Pinocchio rating when it was used by President Barack Obama.

The number is based on a 20-year-old survey that involved 251 people — a pitiful sampling size by any standard. The survey occurred before the Brady Background Check law became fully operational.

Following a tragic school shooting at an Oregon high school, Shannon Watts, founder of a Bloomberg-supported group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, claimed there had been 74 school shootings in the 18 months between the Sandy Hook tragedy and the Oregon attack. CNN and other news agencies used that number without checking its veracity.

When they finally did check, they discovered that many of these so-called "school shootings" were anything but.

One was an apparent case of domestic violence in a school parking lot two weeks before school started. At least three others were suicides in which nobody but the shooter was harmed. A couple involved gang conflicts, and some didn't even happen on a school campus, but just nearby.

CNN found that only 15 of the 74 shootings mapped by Everytown actually met the criteria of such an incident.

Add to these canards the oft-repeated claim that "31,000 people die from gun violence every year." This number creates the impression that they are all murder victims, and that's simply not true.

Check the FBI Uniform Crime Data, and you will find that fewer than 8,900 people were murdered with guns in 2012. The others were suicides, accident victims and people justifiably shot by police or private citizens in self-defense.

All of this boils down to one thing: Bloomberg can't buy his way into heaven by trampling on the rights of his fellow citizens, and he sure as hell shouldn't have to cloak his intentions in a fabric of lies.

Alan Gottlieb is founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation. Dave Workman is communications director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.